Abstract:

Gaining access to land is a problem that confronts both Government and non state
capitalist agents in Ghana. The study examined why the state lacks an effective
institutional capacity with the political and technical competence to mediate conflict
of interests in its domestic land polity for land acquisition. It was interesting to
observe that even Governments faced problems of land acquisition within the
sovereign boundaries of the state. The investigative searchlight was therefore put on
the competence of the public land bureaucracy to mediate conflict of interests among
autonomous rational actors in two empirical cases of government land acquisition.
From the perspective of the rational institutional political theory, the study discovered
that the public land bureaucracy lack any formal obligations with traditional land
owners and land tenants for these actors to collectively engage Government in a
rational discourse of land acquisition. On the contrary, the public land bureaucracy
has not shed off its post-colonial cloth as an institution of violence used by
Governments to deconstruct rival traditional land institutions. The traditional land
institutions however own about 80% of the country’s available land. Moreover,
traditional land institutions continue to receive social legitimacy and among the
general populace. Conversely, the power status of the public land bureaucracy have
seen continued decline in line with its negative productive efficiency.
Underlying the problems of government land acquisition is a constitutionally
bifurcated state with divided sovereignty over its land and people; whose public land
bureaucracy lacks the political competence to mediate conflict of interests among
Government, Traditional Authorities, and Land Tenants in discourses of land
acquisition. The traditional state makers who laid the foundations of the state through
war-making are in conflict over land ownership with the modern state makers who
also inherited the state from colonial mercantilist powers. The emerging hypothesis
from the study is that; a political institution with strong institutionalized obligatory
relationships with relevant autonomous rational actors is more likely to competently
mediate conflict of interests in a discursive object or issue, than a political institution
that has weak or no institutionalized obligations with relevant autonomous rational
actors within its institutionalized environment.